So you’ve found yourself on this page because you’ve been tracking your food and exercise, weighing and measuring everything you consume. You weighed in this morning buck-ass naked, but the scale keeps telling you that your weight ISN’T going down! Or worse, it’s going up!

WHEN YOUR SCALE IS GOING UP, AND YOU’RE DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT, KEEP GOING. THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO IS GIVE UP.

Scales are the worst kind of liar!

They lie by omitting the whole complete truth. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your scale is guilty! Guilty, I tell you!!! The entire lot of them are seemingly flawed devices, but there’s a substantial caveat. Let me explain.

Your scales have a bad reputation, but they are genuinely trying to be good!

Your poor misunderstood bathroom scale has one purpose, and the only purpose ONLY: to measure the total mass of your body plus your clothing/accessories when you stand on it. Your scale is EXTREMELY good at this job. You can even put a suitcase on it, and it will faithfully tell you that you’re taking way too much stuff on your trip! It will just tell you the total mass of the suitcase and everything in it. You can put your cat on it (if she’d just sit still for 4 seconds), and the scale will tell you the total mass of your cat. The scale is very good at its one job.

But most of us never got the memo on the scale’s intended purpose. When WE step on the scale, we want the scale to say, “Yay! Your hard work is paying off, and you’ve burned some of that fat off your body! Hooray!” Because when we set out to lose weight, what we are aiming for is fat loss. That is where the scale starts to lose its utility in the short-term only. Your total scale-weight includes your muscles, bone, organs, skin, toenails, and even chin hair, not just fat. Weight fluctuates daily due to: food you’ve eaten, poop, water, sodium, water retention, glycogen, etc. So your weight is more of a weight range.

We expect to lose weight when we faithfully stick to our weight loss plan, logging all calories consumed, faithfully weighing and measuring, and sticking to our desired calorie deficit! After all, the Law of Conservation of Energy tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted to from one form to another.

So If I’m sure I’m eating less than I’m burning, why won’t the scale play ball and get with the program???

Our bodies like to mess with us! That’s why it looks like you’re not losing weight when you are losing fat!

The most likely cause of this is water retention, but it could be poop or sodium-related. WATER RETENTION, that little jerk! When we’re operating in a calorie deficit, our bodies WILL make up the difference by burning our fat reserves from our bodies.

We are not unique little snowflakes, and our bodies have been honed through millions of years of natural selection! If you’re worried, you have thyroid problems, PCOS, or something else that is making your metabolism slow, by all means, visit your doctor and have them check it out.

If your doctor tells you nothing is wrong with your metabolism, believe them. I thought my metabolism was broken for years. Still, it worked as nature intended, storing the extra calories I consumed here and there as fat. You know, for when the famine comes… or whatever.

My Weight Loss Graph is shown above. This graph represents five months of DAILY weigh-ins. Look at all of that delicious data! Notice all those ups and downs? Totally normal. If you zoom in on some weeks or months, it looks like I wasn’t losing anything, then a week later, I drop a bunch of scale-weight. Also, totally normal. My calorie deficit in this period was around 500-700 calories per day, which averages out to about 5 pounds a month, which is fantastic! Yay me!

The point of showing you this is to remind you that bodies are quirky biological systems with complex mechanisms. Water comes and goes in spurts. Fat is burned slowly but consistently when in a calorie deficit. It is. Energy cannot be created from anything. Trust the science; it is sound. Too many people give up when their scale-weight stalls a little, and it makes me sad to see it happen. They give up because they think it’s not working for them. But it is. They just didn’t know the scale was a liar!

So when you step on the scale, and it goes up instead of down, check yourself before you wreck yourself! Suppose you’re weighing and measuring accurately and sticking to your calorie deficit. In that case, you ARE losing fat, and it WILL show up sooner rather than later if you stick to the program. It may take a couple of days to a month (at most), but weight loss always catches up.

YOU CAN PERSEVERE! IT IS WORKING!!! I BELIEVE IN YOU!!! ?